MealTime

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Inspiration

For those who don’t enjoy cooking, don’t know how to cook, or simply are too busy, getting takeout or eating out may be a staple of their daily lives. But while eating out can be convenient and time-saving, when done frequently over a long period of time it can also become unhealthy, expensive, and unsustainable. Studies have shown that those who cook at home tend to have healthier overall diets, healthier BMIs, and spend less money per month on food, while eating out often is associated with weight gain, lower quality diets, and higher spending on food. It is well known that university students frequently eat out. According to this poll conducted in an online forum, ~61% of university students reported eating out three times a week or more, with ~38% reporting eating out at least once per day. In a separate poll, 177 out of 436 (~40%) university students reported eating out twice or more each week. Students may opt to eat out instead of cooking at home for a variety of reasons. Students tend to be busy, especially toward the end of a term, or may not know how or what to cook. Food insecurity is also an issue faced by certain students which can restrict their eating options. One solution to eating healthier while saving on time and money is meal planning. According to this study, those who plan their meals have healthier diets and a much lower rate of obesity. However, meal planning can be a cognitive heavy task. Our app aims to streamline this process by generating a weekly meal plan curated to the user’s eating preferences such as the number of meals they eat in a day, diet restrictions, nutritional goals, budget, etc. Moreover, the app will provide recipe instructions for each meal to help users to learn to cook and produce a corresponding grocery list to the meal plan to ease their experience with grocery shopping. Overall, our app aims to encourage students to cook at home by simplifying the meal planning process.

What it does

(What we wanted to do - not yet fully functional): A mobile app that will generate weekly meal plans for users according to their eating preferences (diet restrictions, nutritional goals, budget, time, etc.). A list of groceries for the given meal plan will also be generated!

How we built it

The design of the app was developed on Figma. We built the mobile app using Android Studio and Kotlin!

Challenges we ran into

We lacked time :(. A lot of us were busy (cough cough socializing). Learning to work in the Android Studio environment was challenging since it did not have the same workflow as web development (most of us had a web dev background).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the work we were able to accomplish despite the time constraints!

What we learned

Some of us learned how to use git rebase command to merge our changes. We also learned how to create a mobile app using Android Studio and Kotlin (which resembles Java), particularly, how Activities and Fragments work (lifecycle, difference), editing layouts using xml, how navigation works (navigation host, navigation controller, navigation graph)

What's next for MealTime

• Implement meal calendar
• Implement grocery list
• Implement settings (modify eating preferences)
• Implement backend.

Built With

• android
• android-studio
• kotlin
• xml